Turkmenistan is to spend around USD 1.5 billion to build a new city whose construction will be overseen by the son of the isolated country's all-powerful leader.
A report shown on state television Tuesday said that Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov had ordered the government to allocate the money to import equipment necessary to build city infrastructure.
Television footage showed Berdymukhamedov flying in a helicopter over the site where the presently nameless new city will be built in the Ahal region where his son Serdar Berdymukhamedov heads the provincial government.
Aleksandr Dadayev, chairman of the country's union of industrialists and entrepreneurs, praised the project as "unprecedented" and "a city for the centuries."